From One High Schooler to Another…

Last summer, I asked my then-9th grader to collaborate with me on a video. What advice did she wish another homeschool teen had given her? Any parent of a teenager knows that, sometimes, they hear best when the advice comes from a peer rather than their parent!

So copy this link & send it to your teen. Or send them the link for the next time they are on YouTube!

Learn Your Limits

Learn how long you can work on a subject before you become unproductive. This will help you to plan your schedule for the day.

But you also have to learn to push through. There’s a difference between wanting to be done and being done. Don’t confuse them!

Sometimes you have to keep pushing through even though you are D-O-N-E. If you have a deadline you need to meet, you just have to figure out how to keep going.

Deadlines!

Keep watching those deadlines! When you get a syllabus at the beginning of the year, put everything down on your planner. If you see that you have a couple of big assignments in one week, start early.

On Outsourced Classes

Know what your teachers want & how they want you to do the work. They will teach you this at the beginning of the year. Write it down and keep it somewhere you can find it again.

Don’t be afraid to e-mail your teachers to ask questions. Teachers want us to do well.

Don’t forget bigger projects in other subjects or your afterschool activities. If you focus only on one class, you may forget something else you have to do. If you remember to write everything on your planner, you know when you have a big game coming up or two tests in one week.

Learn how to….

• use a planner effectively. How do you need to see assignments written out? Experiment until you find the best way for you.
• take notes well, based on the subject & what you’ll need the notes for. Your notes shouldn’t be longer than the assignment. If you need to reproduce an image, like in science, make sure you draw it in your notes.
• Learn how to….use a calculator well. If you haven’t used one very much, play around with it before school starts. You don’t want to have to learn how to use your calculator when you’re also trying to learn how to do the math. (This is the one we use.)
• type. It’s boring to learn but it will make your homework go more quickly.
• use Google docs. It’s easy to share documents and it saves your papers automatically. You can also sync it across more than one computer.
  
  (Ahem, Mom here. Excuse me while I interrupt! A helpful tip we found was to edit her papers together by doing it simultaneously through Google Docs. After she shared the link to her paper with me, we’d both open it up. It was easier for her to understand what I was correcting and it was easier for me to make sure that I led while she did the improving. As a 10th grader, she rarely needed my help anymore!)

Most-Used Resources

• Plum Paper School Planner
• Quizlet
• Khan Academy videos for math review & additional help
• SparksNotes Modern Readings for Shakespeare